Safe Place Drawing: Art-Based Therapy Activity

• Paper in whatever size the client prefers
• Colored pencils, markers, or oil pastels (pastels blend well for skies and water)
• Magazines, scissors, and a glue stick for clients who would rather collage
• Optional: a small object from the client's real place, such as a shell or a photo
• A phone or computer, if you plan to pair the drawing with the guided tool

Before starting, ask which word fits best (safe, calm, comfortable, peaceful) and use the client's word all the way through.

1. 1
   Explain the purpose. The place is somewhere to rest the mind and settle the body, and hard memories stay out of this exercise.
2. 2
   Invite the client to choose a place: real, like a grandparent's porch, or taken from a book, a game, or pure imagination. A place with no people is often simplest, though a pet or a trusted figure is fine.
3. 3
   Draw the place. Encourage detail over skill: the color of the light, the time of day, what is underfoot.
4. 4
   Add the senses. Around the edge or inside the picture, write or draw what the client would notice:

   • See: colors, shapes, light
   • Hear: birds, rain, a fan, or the quiet
   • Smell: pine, coffee, sunscreen, clean laundry
   • Feel: warm or cool air, a breeze, sand or carpet underfoot
   • Taste, if anything fits: cocoa, salt air, mint
5. 5
   Add a boundary if the client wants one, such as a fence, a door that locks from the inside, a bubble, or a guard animal. Some clients need to know that nothing can get in.
6. 6
   Choose a cue word that brings the place back, like "porch" or "blue," and write it on the drawing.
7. 7
   Practice briefly. With the drawing in view, the client spends a minute imagining being there and noticing the body. Ask for a 0 to 10 calm rating before and after.
8. 8
   Pair it with the guided tool. Open the Calm Place Visualization and enter details from the drawing: the place, what the client sees, hears, and feels, and the cue word. The script then walks through the place one line at a time, at the client's pace. If the client fills it in on their own phone or computer, what they type stays on that device, so they can come back to it at home.
9. 9
   Decide where the drawing lives, such as a folder or a phone photo. Suggest short practice on ordinary days so the place is easier to reach on hard ones.

• During: What is the first thing you notice when you arrive there?
• During: If you stood still for a minute, what would you hear?
• During: What would make it even a little more comfortable?
• After: What happens in your body as you look at it?
• After: From 0 to 10, how calm do you feel now?
• After: When this week could you visit this place for one minute?

• Kids: Call it a cozy place or a calm spot, and let them fill it with favorite toys or animals. Keep practice to about a minute, and pair the cue word with a gesture like a hand on the chest.
• Teens: Accept a parked car with music on or a bedroom with the door shut, as well as game and fantasy worlds. Some teens would rather make a photo collage.
• Adults: A quick sketch plus written sensory notes works well, and magazine collage helps clients who say they can't draw.
• Groups: Each member makes their own place, and sharing stays optional and brief, such as one sound from each place. Skip group scripts that pick one setting for everyone, since a beach can frighten someone who nearly drowned.

• Trauma: Some clients, especially those with complex trauma, have never felt safe anywhere, and asking for a safe place can stir up grief or alarm. Use calm, comfortable, or "a little more okay" instead, and welcome an imagined place, an object, a color, or one moment of ease.
• Distress in the image: If something distressing enters the place (a person, a memory, the light going dark), stop the imagery, have the client open their eyes, and orient to the room. Then help them choose another place or add a boundary.
• Flooding and grounding: If the client becomes tearful, numb, or spacey, shift to grounding: feet on the floor, naming objects in the room, or 5-4-3-2-1 grounding. Calm can feel unfamiliar or even unsafe at first, so keep early practice very short.
• When to stop: Stop if calm keeps turning into distress, if the client dissociates, or if the activity keeps pulling toward trauma memories. Trouble reaching calm is useful information and may mean more stabilization is needed before trauma processing.
• No diagnostic interpretation: Read nothing diagnostic into what appears or is missing in the picture, such as an empty landscape or a locked door. The client's own description is what matters.

A woman in her forties starting trauma-focused work said she had never felt safe anywhere, so the clinician asked instead for a place that felt "a little more okay." She drew a kitchen table at night under a single lamp, with a mug, the hum of the refrigerator, and the smell of mint tea. Asked what would make it more comfortable, she added a chain lock on the door and a cat on the windowsill. Her calm rating went from 3 to 5 while she looked at the drawing. They entered her details into the Calm Place Visualization and chose the cue word "lamp," and she agreed to practice for one minute each evening before bed.